


hey, brother

by lestered



Series: pff bingo 2019 [1]
Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Christmas, Domestic, Family Bonding, M/M, post coming-out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 12:53:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,587
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20706308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lestered/pseuds/lestered
Summary: It’s time for Phil to reintroduce himself to Dan’s family in the proper context, but there’s one member that he’s not entirely confident about connecting with.





	hey, brother

**Author's Note:**

> written for pff's 2019 bingo fest! checks off "in-laws," "cereal," and "communication."

Phil wakes up too early, like he always does after spending the night in an unfamiliar bed. Not per his usual, though, he remembers where he is before he even opens his eyes, the soreness in his back an immediate reminder that he’s not at home, settled into a nest of warm grey sheets and cushy pillows in a bed with much better support than the double-size air mattress set up on the floor of Dan’s childhood bedroom.

_ “Uh, it’s not ideal,” Karen had told them while showing them upstairs, pushing open Dan’s closed bedroom door to reveal a large air mattress taking up the majority of the floorspace. “But setting a bed for Phil on the couch seemed a bit stupid, and expecting you both to cram all of your giant limbs into that tiny single bed… seemed even stupider.” _

_ Dan had just laughed and shook his head and tossed his bag lightly onto the center of the comforter spread neatly over their makeshift accommodation. “It’s great, mum. Thank you.” _

Phil smiles to himself just thinking about it, still not quite ready to open his eyes. He knows it’s not a big deal, but at the same time it _ is _ a big deal - them sharing a bed in Dan’s family home, his mum making one up _ for _them to share without even being asked. Phil knows that it means a lot to Dan, that six months later he’s still reeling from such overwhelming support from the people he’d spent most of his life just trying to hide from. Phil’s happy because Dan’s happy and also because it’s what’s right. That just makes him smile wider and roll onto his other side, reaching his arm out and searching for Dan’s warm body to snuggle into.

When his hand lands on nothing but an empty mattress, though, he frowns, and finally opens his eyes.

*

The house is quiet while he putters around upstairs, which he reckons is because it’s not even gone 7am according to his phone, which also has a text from Dan explaining that his Nana’s called him over to her house with an iPad-related technology issue. Unlike when they’re in London, he can’t quite get away with ignoring her early-morning calls when she’s just a few minutes away.

Phil does his best to stay quiet too, because his limbs are long and clumsy and Dan’s house is old with creaky floorboards so it’s truly a concerted effort, but he does manage to make it to the bathroom and back without a racket.

When he gets back, he perches on the bed - the real bed, Dan’s single bed, which seems so foreign and faraway now even though he’s literally right on top of it - and checks to see if Dan’s replied to his _ and how’s that going for you _text.

He has. 

_ [Dan]: it’s all good she couldn’t connect to the wifi so i reset her router _

_ [Dan]: she’s making breakfast now _

Just reading the word _ breakfast _makes Phil’s stomach grumble, and he stares forlornly at his phone screen as if it’ll make a bowl of cereal materialize right in front of him.

It doesn’t, but he does get another text.

_ [Dan]: have you eaten yet? _

He blinks at the message a couple of times. He’d actually thought that he’d wait for Dan to get home to have breakfast with him. But now that Dan’s otherwise occupied… 

_ [Phil]: Um… no? I didn’t know your grandma was gonna keep you, so I was planning on waiting. _

_ [Dan]: just go get something from the kitchen, you dingus. you’re a big boy, you know how to eat by yourself. _

Phil rolls his eyes fondly, but he can’t really ignore the tiny, anxious fluttering in the pit of his stomach, as much as he wants to. He feels kind of stupid sending his next response, but it’s the truth.

_ [Phil] That’s weird though, it’s not my house. I can’t just like… help myself. _

His stomach does another nervous little flip when he sees the three little gray dots pop up on Dan’s side of the screen, then go away again, then pop up again. It’s longer than Dan usually takes to type and it doesn’t take that many words to tell him he’s being daft.

He knows he is. It’s just that stupid anxiety that still crops up every now and then, the kind where he’s scared to make phone calls or answer the door or go to big gatherings and Dan covers him, but he’s not here to do that right now. And he shouldn’t have to be.

When Dan’s message finally pops up, he blows out a deep breath before reading.

_ [Dan]: i go down to the kitchen and fix myself food all the time when we’re at your parents’ house. i know it’s different here but mum wants you to make yourself at home and so do i so go to the kitchen and get yourself a fucking bowl of crunchy nut, i refuse to come home to see you all grumpy and haggard just because you didn’t have your morning coffee and cereal _

Phil has to bite back a smile at that. The idea of getting close to Dan’s family, of making himself comfortable in their space, kind of scares him. He’s pretty sure it scares Dan, too, probably even moreso. But the fact that he wants to try - that he wants them both to try - makes him feel warm inside. 

_ [Dan]: srsly tho. go eat, i won’t be that much longer and then we can hide out in my room for a little while before lunch _

He smiles because alone time with Dan is always a treat even when they’ve only been in others’ company for less than a day, and because Dan’s voice of reason has gone and made him properly hungry, more than he can ignore, so he’s going to satiate himself and he’s going to not worry about it on the way.

*

Phil’s not really sure where to go from here. He doesn’t want to go back up the stairs, because that could accidentally draw attention, and to be caught fleeing from the situation would be embarrassing. 

But, he also doesn’t really want to keep walking into the kitchen.

Karen had told them that Adrian wouldn’t be getting here until this afternoon. 

Phil doesn’t have a problem with him. He’s seen him enough times, had enough courteous chats with him over ten years. It’s kind of weird looking at him though, going on 22 years old, remembering how he’d been been scared shitless to meet him when he was just 12. He’d been scared shitless to meet Dan’s entire family, even though there wasn't anything to be scared about. He was Dan’s good friend, as far as they were concerned, and they were good at keeping up that act, at least around the family - his dad, his mum, his grandparents.

His brother.

He’s not sure if Adrian even particularly cares about him or his relationship with Dan. He does know that out of his entire family, he’d been the one that Dan was the least scared of coming out to. Phil doesn’t know if that’s because the emotional attachment there was less strong than to his mum and grandma, or because he was just younger and more likely to understand, or both.

Phil just doesn’t really _ know _him.

It makes him a little sad. Dan and Martyn are such good friends and Phil loves it, how well Dan slots in with his family. It feels right. 

He has to remind himself all the time that it’s not the same with Dan. That Dan’s family doesn’t mean the same thing to him, that there’s residual fear and anxiety and they’re all still figuring it out with each other as they go and that Phil’s just very, _ very _recently become a real part of it. Sort of. He’s not sure if Dan’s family really knows what to do with him. 

To be fair, he’s not really sure what to do with them either. It’s all new. That’s why spending Christmas with Dan’s family feels so huge, even though they’ve all been acting casual about it. He doesn’t _ feel _casual. He doesn’t think any of them do, but it’s a work in progress.

He thinks back to Karen showing them into Dan’s room the day before.

_ “Next time you come round, we’ll have a proper double bed. Should've gotten you a bigger one when you hit puberty, anyway. God knows you could've used a bit more space.” _

He remembers seeing Dan’s dimple cave in the way it does when he’s holding back a little smile, remembers thanking her when she left them to get settled in and Dan practically tackling him down onto the mattress. Remembers thinking how happy he was to have another safe space, that he could hardly imagine how Dan must be feeling, with that safe space finally being his own family. 

“Oh shit, Phil!”

*

Adrian’s expression once he’s finally turned around from the kitchen counter is startled, and Phil feels startled in return despite having just been stood there, staring like a freak.

He imagines it’s probably a comical sight from the outside - him standing frozen in his flannel pajama bottoms, Friends t-shirt, mismatched socks, glasses and bedhead, opposite Adrian and his oversized button-up shirt and running shorts, which seems to Phil to be an odd combination, but he supposes he can’t judge. His wrist tattoo peeks out from under the cuff, beside where he’s clutching a glass bottle of ketchup in his hand, and a tablespoon in the other.

“Sorry!” He finally manages, once his initial deer-in-headlights reaction wears off, and he takes a couple steps back. “Didn’t mean to interrupt anything, I’ll leave you to um…” He glances at the ketchup and tablespoon again. “...Whatever you’re doing.”

He’s about to turn back when Adrian sets his spoon down with a slightly-too-loud clamor. “No, that’s alright! I’m just… I don’t need a lot of room,” he turns and pushes the spoon to the side, along with a small bowl and a handful of other ingredients. He’s still gripping the ketchup very firmly when Phil approaches.

“Right, um,” Phil clears his throat a bit. “I just thought I’d come get some… cereal?” 

He phrases it like a question, even though it’s not, and quickly follows it up. “Dan’s having breakfast over at your nana’s, I guess, so… he said you guys might have Crunchy Nut.”

Adrian just watches as he opens the cupboard directly in front of him, which contains nothing but bowls and glasses. It kind of hits him then, as he’s taking out a bowl, that he doesn’t really know where the Howells keep anything in their kitchen. He doesn’t know his way around their home the way Dan does with the Lesters’.

_ Different circumstances, _he reminds himself.

He doesn’t overthink anymore, because then Adrian’s handing him a box of Crunchy Nut, which he appears to have grabbed from the cupboard on his right. 

“We usually do,” he tells him, before going back to his cluster of ingredients on the counter. “It’s mum’s favorite.”

So that’s where Dan gets it from, he muses.

He thinks about saying as much, but settles instead for a quiet thanks before opening up the box and shaking some into his bowl. He glances over at Adrian while he’s ambling over to put it back in the cupboard, where he seems intently focused on smacking the bottom of the ketchup bottle as he holds it carefully over the tablespoon he’s set out on the counter. 

It’s so uncanny to look at him, even still. He and Dan have always looked alike, but the resemblance as they get older just seems to grow. Adrian still looks more like Karen while Dan looks more like their dad, not that Phil would ever bring that up. It’s just one of those things they know but don’t care to acknowledge, because there’s really no point.

It’s not just appearance. Adrian doesn’t just look like Dan, but he talks a lot like him too, he uses the same awkward body language, hand gestures and finger guns, and he’s got a rather foul mouth. Phil assumes he probably picked that up from Dan when they were kids, who picked it up from Karen, who he’s not sure she picked it up from, as their nana’s rather posh and proper and scolds Dan any time he uses a swear word on Twitter. 

That particular thought comes to him because Adrian’s currently cursing and mumbling under his breath - another habit he shares with Dan - as he tries and fails to get the ketchup out of the bottle. Phil pulls out a drawer and, relieved to find that it’s in fact the silverware drawer, pulls out a spoon before bumping it closed and looking across the counter. 

“Um,” He slides the spoon into his dry cereal. “What are you making?”

Adrian’s head jerks up, as if he’s surprised to see Phil still standing there, before sighing and setting down his bottle of ketchup. 

“Making a glaze for the lentil loaf we’re having tonight,” he tells him, and Phil has to do his best to keep a straight face. He knows that Christmas Eve dinner is going to be fully vegan; it’s a deal Karen had made with their grandma, on the condition that she’d be allowed to cook a supplementary turkey and mashed potatoes with real butter for Christmas dinner. He grins a little to himself, knowing that his presence at Christmas this year was a big reason for such a compromise. He knows that were it up to Karen, Dan, and Adrian, Dan’s grandparents might have spent Christmas stuck in Vegan Hell. He likes having that little bit of camaraderie with them, even if that camaraderie is rooted in questionable ethics. “If I can get the ketchup out of this ridiculous fucking bottle,” he glares at the glass bottle in his hand. “I was just trying to save the whales.”

Phil snorts a little, because that’s _ so _like something Dan would say, before glancing between the bottle and the spoon again. “Have you tried putting it in a bowl first?”

Adrian glances at him curiously, and Phil opens cupboard and pulls out another bowl. 

“Can I?” He asks, and Adrian wordlessly hands him the bottle. He caps it again, shakes it till the ketchup actually slides down to the bottle opening, before uncapping it and smacking a few globs into the bowl. 

“Now just scoop out however much you need, and then you can scrape the excess back into the bottle,” he tells him, and slides the bowl back across the counter. Adrian just stares at it for a second, before breathing out a laugh and dropping his elbows down onto the counter. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, I’m so stupid,” he picks up the spoon and measures out one tablespoon into the other bowl, then two, then three. “Thanks,” he adds when he’s finished, glancing back over at Phil as he scrapes the leftovers back, as suggested. Phil just nods. 

“I can take that,” he offers, and Adrian hands the bottle over again. Phil heads over to the fridge, setting the ketchup inside and searching for a moment before pulling out a carton of almond milk and pouring some into his cereal. Adrian’s eyebrows shoot up in what seems to be pleasant surprise. 

“Oh, did Dan finally get you to go vegan too?”

Phil’s confused for a moment, before he actually registers what Adrian’s referencing and he glances at the carton in his hand and quickly sets it back inside the fridge. “Oh, no. No. Not vegan, just lactose intolerant,” he explains awkwardly, and Adrian gives him a slow nod before turning back to his glaze, while Phil takes his first spoonful of cereal. 

“Wait, what do you mean ‘finally’_ ?” _Phil asks after a few moments of silence, his spoon suspended halfway between the cereal bowl and his mouth. “Has he been trying?” 

Adrian glances up from where he’s drizzling a bit of carob syrup into his spoon, and purses his lips as if stifling a laugh, the exact same way Dan does. 

“Not actively, I don’t think,” he tells him, setting his syrup to the side and reaching for the balsamic vinegar. “He just complains sometimes that he can’t stick to the vegan diet when you’re always tempting him with animal products.”

Phil holds his gaze for a moment before they both burst out into laughter, him setting his cereal to the side and Adrian doing the same with his vinegar. 

“I’m kidding,” Adrian tells him, leaning his hip against the counter. “He just wants someone to blame for the fact that he loves meat and cheese.”

Phil chuckles and turns back to his cereal, because prolonged eye contact still makes him nervous. “The cheese is all him. If it were up to me we wouldn’t have any in the house, I can’t stand it.”

He takes another spoonful of his cereal and then without really thinking adds, “I did a video taste-testing different kinds once and felt sick for nearly a whole day afterwards.”

Adrian nods, smiles a little, and goes back to his balsamic vinegar. Phil kind of regrets saying anything then, because he’s not sure if YouTube is an okay topic for them to broach. Or social media, or the internet in general. He’s had a number of things he’s wanted to say to Adrian for a little while, many of them along the lines of _ I’m sorry we kept this huge secret from you for so long, _ but one of them also being _ I’m sorry our fans harassed you off the internet, especially when you were just a kid. _That one’s been brewing for more than a little while, actually. But he has a feeling he should keep his mouth shut. Some things might be best just left in the past, and it’s not really up to him to decide if this is one of them.

“So anyway-” he starts after a few moments of silence, at the same time that Adrian lifts his head and says, “So you guys-”

They pause at the same time, and laugh awkwardly, and Phil leans back against the counter. 

“Sorry,” he says. “Go ahead.”

Adrian turns back and briefly stares into his bowl of glaze again. He’s still stirring it idly when he looks up to make eye contact. “So you guys have kinda been through a lot together, huh?”

Phil feels a bit of a lump in his throat and a squirming in the pit of his stomach because this is a conversation he’s had. He’s had it with Dan, with Dan’s mum, and even his grandma. But he never really thought anything would come from his brother. He figured they might have gotten up to some heart-to-hearts on their family trip to France earlier in the year, but he wasn’t expecting that to extend to him. 

“Um. Yeah,” he sighs, and drums his fingers on the countertop to release some of the nervous energy. Suddenly Adrian looks so young. Barely younger than Phil was when he met Dan, and that feels like a lifetime ago. When Dan was so full of pain and sorrow and yearning, desperate to get away from the first eighteen years of his life and start anew.

He knows Dan’s life growing up was shitty for reasons besides the homophobic assholes who made his life a living hell at school. 

“You guys too, though,” he finally ventures, hesitantly, questioningly. 

Adrian seems surprised, but not offended, which comes as a relief. 

“Yeah,” he nods and turns back to his bowl of glaze again, beginning to stir again even though it looks thoroughly mixed. “Lots of levels in Portal I couldn’t have beaten without his help.”

That’s not all there is to it, Phil’s painfully aware, but he doesn’t push it. He knows, and he’s sure Adrian knows he knows, and there’s not really any need to go any further. 

And luckily there’s no need to try and think of anything else, because just then they hear the front door swinging open, followed by a couple of happy yips and then Dan walking into the kitchen, bringing with him a gust of cold air and Colin trotting at his heels.

“Oh, good, you found the cereal.” Dan says when he notices the bowl sitting on the counter, and when Adrian’s turned away he rests a hand on the small of Phil’s back and quietly kisses his cheek.

Dan’s lips and nose are cold, but Phil’s cheeks warm up all the same.

He occupies himself with his cereal again, which has gone quite soggy, while Dan reaches into the fridge for some orange juice and then glances over at Adrian’s concoction. 

“Whatcha making there?” He asks, and Adrian smiles brightly. 

“Glaze for the lentil loaf,” he replies, and holds up the spoon. “Wanna taste?” 

Dan strides over, and takes a little lick off the spoon. Phil can tell from his expression that he’s not exactly thrilled, but he nods and gives a thumbs up anyway. 

“Tastes great,” he tells his brother. “Can’t wait for dinner.”

Adrian catches onto the bullshit, because it’s not that hard, meets Phil’s gaze and joins him in a fond eyeroll.

Phil waits for Dan to come back and stand beside him, bumps their shoulders together, and takes another bite of his Crunchy Nut.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!
> 
> [title source](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxIiPLVR6NA)
> 
> hmu on [tumblr!](https://cloudtwentythree.tumblr.com/)


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